Proceedings Paper

Demand for inter-activity drives the massive introduction of a return channel in CATV systems by means of the HFC architecture. Cost-effectiveness dictates sharing this return channel among many customers and the most suitable method is TDMA which can accommodate the high burstiness of the upstream traffic. The MAC protocol arbitrating the access to the time slots combines more than one access mechanisms but reservation ALOHA is the most promising method for the identification of busy stations. In this work a novel method allowing simultaneous reservations without previous symbol synchronization is presented. The simultaneous single symbol reservation (S3R) scheme greatly reduces the overhead for reservation sub-slots but also allows better and more predictable performance improving system utilization.